Representative Government: the Unsolved Puzzle

The United States is a representative government.  The United Nations is a representative government.  Russia is a representative government. And so is China and maybe a hundred other nations are representative governments.

In the United States, you and I and every other voter, each have five reps who claim to be representing us, personally. Not a single one of them actually do represent us. Rather, they are reps of some political party with which we voters are compelled to establish a relationship. If we want to participate in the governments of our state and nation, we fall in line and do as we are told.

Is this the governing system that the Founders thought they were establishing? Has the world of nations fallen in line with the Founders’ ideas of how people can set up their own representative systems? Or is every nation simply mocking the failed system that the U.S. flaunts as being authentic? What would we have to do to make ours authentic? Better yet, what have we done to destroy authenticity?

Whatever authenticity we had at the beginning was based on the Congressional District that had no more than 40,000 people. How did the Founders come up with 40,000? Good question. Would 20,000 have been better? Who knows?  When the optimum number is finally determined, the nation can have an authentic representative system. They will shop around their manageable local district and choose a rep without any assistance from a political party.

The representative system lost whatever authenticity it had as its corrupt reps expanded their districts by a factor of seventeen times and sometimes distorted their boundaries ridiculously.  Nor were the states any help as they created all the extra, unneeded districts. One standardized set of districts can run the entire federal system of fifty-one governments.

The world’s phony representative systems need to get rid of their partisanship. The way to get rid of partisanship is to reduce the size of each district to the point that local voters can competently use the neighborhood gossiping system to locate their reps. If free and fair elections are held, those reps will be locally derived and authentic.  That is the key to having governments of the people, by the people, and for the people. If County Election Departments were empowered by their State Governments to set up and supervise a system of such districts throughout the nation, the voters would happily abandon their divisive partisan elections system. They would happily tell their five impotent reps where to go.